With the world premiere of Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song happening at SXSW on Friday, March 10th and the film opening commercially a week later, it might be time to once again post a transcript of a phone conversation I had with Malick 21 years and 8 months ago. The date was 10.25.95 (or so I recall) around 11:35 am.

I happen to be one of the only journalists to have had any kind of conversation with Malick since he went into his Thomas Pynchon withdrawal phase in 1979 (right after the release of Days of Heaven) and became a phantom-like figure whom journalists couldn’t get to under any circumstance.

In this context speaking to Malick on the phone was like snapping a photo of Bigfoot. It was a half-pleasant, half-awkward, mostly meaningless conversation, but at least he picked up the phone.

Malick had been staying with producer Mike Medavoy, who wound up producing The Thin Red Line, but Medavoy was leaving for Shanghai and Malick would be staying elsewhere, so I called Medavoy’s home to get a forwarding number. A cleaning woman answered and said Medavoy was out, but that Malick was nearby. She asked me to hold…

Malick: Hi.
HE: Hi, Terry. This is Jeffrey Wells speaking.
Malick: Hi.
HE: And uhh…I was just talking to Mike last night and he said, uh, you might be leaving today and I wanted to see if I could speak with you about an article I’m researching. It’s for Los Angeles magazine and my editor…he worked on that piece about ten years ago with David Handleman for California magazine. It was called ‘Absence of Malick.’
Malick: Yeah.
HE: I don’t know if…did you happen to read it?
Malick: No, I…uhnn…
HE: Anyway, I’m doing this piece and trying to sort things through here. About what’s going on with…well, to start with, The Thin Red Line and that rumored BAM stage production of “Sansho the Bailiff” and…I’ve wanted to speak with you about it, and now that I’m speaking with you I feel…well, I feel nervous.

Audiences decide very quickly if a certain actor is an acceptable, believable choice for a certain character. Or not. We’re all familiar with pre-2010 casting decisions that were instantly derided by the planet earth as unpalatable but what are some of the more glaring casting mistakes of the last, oh, six or seven years?

All-Time Classics: (1) Patricia Arquette as an actress pretending to be a doctor in John Boorman‘s Beyond Rangoon (’95); (2) Jack Black as Carl Denham in Peter Jackson‘s King Kong (’05); (3) Seth Rogen as Britt Reid in The Green Hornet (’11); (4) Hayden Christensen as New Republic feature writer Stephen Glass (his college preppie voice and mock-vulnerable social manner were so grating that it was impossible to accept that seasoned journalists would have bought his schtick) in Shattered Glass; (5) Warren Beatty as a thin Oliver Hardy in The Fortune (’75); (6) Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele in The Boys From Brazil (’78); (7) Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades of Gray (lacking in studly intensity); (8) Denise Richards as an idiotically grinning pilot in Starship Troopers; (9) John Wayne as a Roman Centurion in George Stevens‘ The Greatest Story Ever Told (’65); and (10) Frank Sinatra as a soft-spoken priest in Miracle of the Bells (’48).

If Hollywood was run like Russia and a Vladimir Putin-like figure was the big cheese, PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Brian Cullinan — the guy who fucked up by slipping Warren Beatty the wrong envelope (Best Actress instead of Best Picture) — would already be gone. I don’t know if Cullinan and Academy bigwigs met on Monday to assess the damage, but if they had two ape-sized goons would have stormed in and thrown a bag over Cullinan’s head and dragged him out of the room.

Obviously we don’t live under a Russian strongman and yet Cullinan was harshly dealt with this morning by a smoking-gun Variety article — a Moscow Central timeline piece with exclusive photos and reported/written by Lawrence Yee, Stuart Oldham and Jacob Bryant.

The long-haired person hugging Warren Beatty is Manchester By The Sea‘s Casey Affleck.

The photos and a corresponding timeline show that Cullinan had two envelopes in his hand (along with his cell phone) just prior to handing Beatty what Cullinan thought was the envelope containing the winner of the Best Picture Oscar but which was actually an envelope containing the winner of the Best Actress Oscar (i.e., La La Land‘s Emma Stone), which had been handed out moments earlier.

From the Variety article: “The newly uncovered photographs not only show Cullinan engaged on his phone shortly before the La La Land miscommunication — he’s also photographed mixing two red envelopes backstage alongside Beatty and Best Actor winner Casey Affleck, who had just exited the stage.

“This would dispute PWC’s official explanation that Cullinan grabbed the wrong envelope from a ‘backup pile,’ and shows he was likely always in possession of both the Best Actress envelope (which was given to Beatty) and the Best Picture envelope, the night’s two final awards.

Bill Maher: “I don’t know who writes these speeches…the problem isn’t so much the policy as the personality…Teleprompter Trump doesn’t really match off-the-cuff Trump…you can’t have somebody who is diagnosable as a narcissist and all the rest and think that it’s going to come out well for us…we’re living in Cuckoo Cloudland and this is what he believes…you can see he doesn’t know anything…it’s all well and good to elect this guy who’s going to be the bull in the china shop, but the china being broken is your china…the disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality…his fans don’t believe in facts, mostly, and certainly not fact-checking…all this talk about the forgotten little man…tell me one thing he’s done for [that guy].” Or has even announced intentions along these lines.

It was revealed last August that David Michod and Brad Pitt‘s War Machine (Netflix, 5.26), a comedy-drama about the Afghanistan conflict and Gen. Stanley McChrystal (renamed Gen. Dan McMahon in the film), would not get a 2016 award-season release.

Apparently Pitt, who’s also producing War Machine, didn’t want attention divided between Allied, the World War II shortfaller that opened on 11.23, and War Machine. This, at least, was one of the considerations. Another may have been that War Machine just isn’t an award-season type of film…who knows?

The news disappointed me as War Machine, which is based on Michael Hastings‘ “The Operators“, seemed (and still seems) like it might be an edgier, more interesting film than Allied.

War Machine costars Anthony Michael Hall, Topher Grace, Will Poulter, Tilda Swinton, Jonathan Ing and Ben Kingsley.

I’m actually revved for this…seriously. Too bad about Crudup getting face-hugged (I like the guy — my favorite among the crew) but all is forgiven if Fassbender gets torn limb from limb and then bleeds a combination of milk and Elmer’s Glue-All all over the place. Oh, and I want McBride to squeal like a pig getting its stomach slit open. Not too big on that ridiculous looking cartoon squid in the Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 trailer. I’m not sure this is going to work as well as the original. You can’t just recycle the same jokes and expect everyone to have the same good time. Galaxy 2 pops on May 5th; Alien: Covenant opens two weeks later.

An observation about producer Robert Evans, shared by production designer Richard Sylbert in Michael Daly‘s “The Making of The Cotton Club,” published by New York magazine on 5.7.84:

“It’s not the page views or the ad revenue for Jeff,” says his friend Sasha Stone. “Well, it is about those things, of course, but Jeff mainly has to be Jeff Wells. If he can’t be ‘Jeff Wells,’ he’s dead.  It’s ‘is Jeff Wells still in the Jeff Wells business?'”

Seriously — isn’t everybody more or less committed to their “act” after it fully takes shape and firms up somewhere in their 30s? Everybody wants the income they feel they deserve as well as the status and respect, but mainly they need to fly their pride flag on a daily basis and be a living embodiment of their brand, the real thing, the guy or gal who’s paid his or her dues and come this far…right here, dammit!

I think Toronto Star critic Peter Howell has hit on something here. Visually alluring, easy-to-digest film reviews for those who find reading more than two sentences in tandem to be a bit challenging, but who would probably be okay with reading a comic-strip review any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Seriously, I think this is an attractive way to go, at the very least as a special supplement to regular text-only reviews. Reactions?

Earlier today Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister reported that Fox is developing an event series (i.e., a miniseries based on a specific event or history, and is therefore close-ended) about the Cotton Club, the notorious Harlem hotspot that peaked in the ‘20s. Exec produced by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron and directed by Kenny Leon, the series’ chief writer and showrunner will be Ayanna Floyd.

The show is vaguely cursed, of course, because of the association with Francis Coppola and Robert Evans‘ The Cotton Club (’84) — one of the most scandal-plagued productions and notorious financial disasters in Hollywood history.

I saw this Orion release when it opened in December ’84. I seem to recall feeling mixed about it — not bad in parts but at the same time a film that never really lifted off the ground. I can tell you for sure that I never saw it a second time. Richard Gere, Gregory Hines, Diane Lane (“Hiya, chumps…welcome to Vera’s!”), Lonette McKee, Bob Hoskins, James Remar, Nicolas Cage. It ran 128 minutes, cost $58 million and earned $25,928,721.

It’s not available to stream, and there’s only one Cotton Club DVD (issued in 2001) left in the Amazon library.

But one good thing came out of The Cotton Club, and that was Michael Daly‘s “The Making of The Cotton Club,” a New York magazine article that ran 22 pages including art (pgs. 41 thru 63) and hit the stands on 5.7.84.

It was one of the most engrossing accounts of a troubled production I’ve ever read, and it still is. Dazzle and delusion, abrasive relationships, murder, tap dancing, pussy, cocaine, flim-flam, double talk, financial chicanery and Melissa Prophet. Excellent reporting, amusing, believable, tightly composed…pure dessert.

From Adam Gopnik’s 2.27 New Yorker essay, “Did The Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living In A Computer Simulation?”: “This wasn’t just a minor kerfuffle. This was a major malfunction. Trump cannot be President — forgetting all the bounds of ideology, no one vaguely like him has ever existed in the long list of Presidents, good, bad, and indifferent, no one remotely as oafish or as crude or as obviously unfit. People don’t say ‘Grab ’em by the pussy’ and get elected President. Can’t happen.

“In the same way, while there have been Oscar controversies before — tie votes and rejected trophies — never before has there been an occasion when the entirely wrong movie was given the award, the speeches delivered, and then another movie put in its place. That doesn’t happen. Ever.

“And so both of these bizarre events put one in mind of a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers. There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix. There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it.”

Gopnik’s hah-hah riff reminds me of Don Lemon’s March 2014 speculation if something supernatural may have happened to that missing Malaysian plane (i.e., flight MH 370)

Tilda Swinton is once again an eccentric villain in Bong Joon-ho‘s Okja, a lovable beast flick in the realm of Mighty Joe Young, Pete’s Dragon, E.T., et. al. Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Lily Collins, Steven Yeun and Giancarlo Esposito costar. Netflix will release Okja globally on 6.28 along with theatrical play in section venues.

“Like many other Asian directors who are into action wanks and slaughtering for the sake of slaughtering, the gifted Bong Joon-ho is queer for swords, knives, axes and bullets slicing into and/or shattering human bodies. It gets him off, and after a while it becomes a drag to have to sit through a longish high-concept epic by a guy who either can’t control himself or has no interest in trying.” — from 6.12.14 HE review of Snowpiercer.

“There’s no doubting that Bong Joon-ho is a Brian DePalma devotee in the same way that DePalma was a Hitchcock acolyte in the ’70s and ’80s,” I wrote on 5.17.09. “Mother was by far the most interesting sit because of his immaculate and exacting composition of each and every element — deliberately unnatural, conspicuously acted, very much a director’s film.” — posted on 5.29.14.

Netflix’s three-part docuseries Five Came Back (debuting on 3.31), adapted from Mark Harris’ same-titled 2014 book and directed by Laurent Bouzereau, is about how five big-time Hollywood directors — John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra and George Stevens — not only captured front-line World War II footage for notable documentaries, but were partially inspired or re-charged by their war experiences, certainly in terms of Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. The talking heads include Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo Del Toro, Paul Greengrass and Lawrence Kasdan with narration by Meryl Streep. No info on the total running time but it sounds like three hours or thereabouts.